Blog Articles

serverless computing

Millions of developers worldwide want to learn more about serverless computing. If you’re one of the lucky thousands attending Red Hat Summit in Boston May 7-9, you can gain hands-on experience with the help of Burr Sutter and the Red Hat Developer team.

Join us for the next online DevNation Live on June 7th at 12pm EDT for Your Journey to a Serverless World—An Introduction to Serverless, presented by Kamesh Sampath and hosted by Burr Sutter. Serverless computing is an emerging architecture that represents a shift in the way developers build and deliver software systems. By removing application infrastructure concerns, development and deployment are simplified, allowing developers to focus on writing code that delivers value. Additionally, operational costs can be reduced by only consuming resources when needed to respond to application events.

In this session, we’ll learn what serverless is and what it means to a developer. Then, we’ll quickly deploy a serverless platform using Apache OpenWhisk on Kubernetes. Using this platform, we’ll demystify which Java™ programming model you should use in a serverless environment. And finally, we’ll look at tools that can make your serverless journey quick, easy, and productive.

Join us for the next online DevNation Live on May 17th at 12pm EDT for Serverless and Servicefull Applications: Where Microservices Complements Serverless hosted by Burr Sutter. Serverless is a misnomer. Your future cloud-native applications will consist of both microservices and functions, wrapped in Linux containers, but in many cases where you, the developer, will be able to ignore the operational aspects of managing the infrastructure and even much of the runtime stack.

In this technical session, we will start by using Apache Whisk, a Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) engine, deployed on Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift to explore how you can complement cloud-native Java applications (microservices) with serverless functions. Next, we’ll open up a serverless web application architecture and deploy an API Gateway into the FaaS platform to examine the microservices talking to the serverless functions. We finish with a look at how event sinks and event sources map in the serverless world.

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Today’s world would be so much richer if we had 29 kinds of hummus?” Neither has Stephanos Bacon, Senior Director of Portfolio Strategy for Red Hat Application Platforms. His entertaining presentation moved from the options available to humans hungry for hummus to a discussion of the bewildering array of choices available to developers and architects. Although too many choices can be a bad thing1, it’s important to understand what choices are relevant today and that the relevance of those choices is always shifting.

There are several things that don’t change, however. Some of the concerns that have been with us since before the dawn of time2 include:

Making developers as productive as possible

Balancing productivity with governance and compliance

Delivering software predictably and in a timely manner

Making software as robust as possible

Prioritizing usability and accessibility

But beyond these goals, there are three factors that are always in flux:

You’re in an IT department. How does the rest of the organization see you? As a valuable asset whose code and APIs make a difference in the marketplace, or as a necessary evil that should be trimmed as much as possible? Containers, microservices, and serverless computing can make you more responsive, flexible, and competitive, which in turn makes your organization more effective. And that puts you solidly in the asset column.

After sprinting through the streets of San Francisco from the stage of the opening keynote at Red Hat Summit 2018 (replay available here), Burr Sutter hosted a packed house in Moscone South to talk about these technologies. Containers are widely accepted (see the announcement from Red Hat and Microsoft for an example), microservices are increasingly popular as an approach to modernizing monolithic applications, and serverless computing is emerging as an important new programming model.